Amira Hass: “Democracy for Israelis” and “A Military Junta for Palestinians”

The idea that Israel has been the Western-style democracy it claimed to be has, writes Amira Hass in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (Feb. 6, 2023), never been true for Palestinians. In an article entitled “Over Decades, Democracy for Israelis has been a Military Junta for Palestinians,” Hass, who lives in the West Bank, assesses the harsh realities which have always faced Palestinians, both within Israel and in the occupied territories.

She points out that, “The present government is dangerous to many Jews…but first and foremost it is dangerous for all Palestinians, on both sides of the Green Line. It could carry out serious expulsion plans, which its senior ministers —- Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir—-have been advancing openly…They are not making do with the ‘small’ and indirect types of banishment that previous Labor and Likud governments conducted—-such as construction bans for Palestinians and crowding them into area A, sending them to the penal colony in Gaza and revoking their residency status. But for the big expulsion, outside the borders of the Greater Land of Israel, political-military chaos must be created. In other words, war. During a war, it will be easier to reprise the Nakba of 1948.”

In Hass’ view, “…long before Justice Ministers acted to weaken the judiciary—- which never stopped the dispossession and discrimination —-expelling Palestinians from their homeland was burnt into Israeli ideology and praxis as a realistic option. Even before the state was founded, it viewed the indigenous people as an unnecessary surplus, who in the best case are to be ignored and in the worst case gotten rid of…The danger of expulsion is concrete because most of the protestors against the government are convinced that, until now, Israel was a democracy. They have been and still are willfully blind to the fact that their democracy for Jews has been a military junta for Palestinians. The dictatorship that they are warning about has been operating already for decades.”

Hass concludes that, “Israel’s military regime over the Palestinians is a parliament, government, courts, jailer and hangman all together…We control a conquered population, deprive it of civil rights and…claimed everything was legal and proper…The worsening harm planned against the Palestinians has a Knesset majority larger than the size of the coalition…Discrimination against the Palestinians is part of the consensus.” **